Outside the window the San Francisco skyline lights up the night. The heavy, hotel curtains are open. From the right angle we can see the Transamerica Pyramid, 555 California Street, and San Francisco Bay. It’s after nine o’clock. In the room next to us, the TV is loud, the sound of preseason baseball drifting through the walls. I pluck another piece of pepperoni from Cassidy’s plate and listen: Giants are up 3 to 2.
Henry emerges from the bathroom and we try hard to ignore the stench that follows. “Chris,” he says, offering his cell phone in an outstretched hand. I wonder if he washed that hand. Wonder if he was on the phone the whole time he was in the bathroom. Henry isn’t the classiest guy in the world. In fact, as he walks from the bathroom I see that the fly of his trousers is down and I would tell him, except that he just stunk up my room. “Aaron Swindler wants to talk to you.” I take the phone from his hand and watch as he gropes for another slice of pizza and quickly lose my appetite.
It’s no coincidence the prospective client’s last name is Swindler. I put on my best salesman voice and saunter to my own corner of the cramped hotel room. “Mr. Swinder,” I say. “How about them Giants?” though from the catcalls in the adjoining room I bet the Giants are no longer winning this game.
I didn’t always want to be an investment banker. When I was six years old I had all sorts of lofty goals: an astronaut, a professional basketball player, a barber (it felt lofty at the time, kind of like a surgeon for hair). As I got older it wasn’t so much about the career itself, but how much it paid. I envisioned a penthouse on the Gold Coast, a fancy sports car, people looking up to me. My mind leaped to lawyers and doctors, pilots, but none of those interested me. By the time college rolled around, I had such a penchant for money that I majored in finance because it felt like the right thing to do. Sit in class with a bunch of other overindulged kids and talk about money. Money, money, money.
That, in retrospect, is probably what enticed me the most about Heidi when we first met. Heidi didn’t obsess with money like everyone else I knew. She obsessed with the lack of money, the have-nots verses the haves, where all I was concerned with was the haves. Who had the most money and how could I get my hands on some?
Aaron Swinder is going on and on about derivatives when I hear my own phone ring from across the room, where it lies on the striped comforter beside Cassidy and now Henry, who, forty and notably single, is staring not so subtly at the sheer pantyhose on her legs. I’m waiting for an important call, one I can’t miss, so I motion to her to answer it, and hear her chant, “Hi there, Heidi,” into the receiver.
I deflate, like a helium balloon after a party. Shit. I hold up a finger to Cassidy—hold on—but since Aaron Swinder won’t stop talking about damn derivatives I’m forced to listen to a protracted conversation between Cassidy and my wife, about the flight to San Francisco, dinner at an expensive steakhouse and the goddamn weather.
Heidi has met Cassidy exactly three times. I know because after each and every one of these meetings I’ve been bombarded with the silent treatment, as if I had anything to do with her recruitment to our team or her good looks for that matter. The first time they met was last summer at a work picnic at the botanical gardens. I’d never mentioned Cassidy to Heidi. She had only been working with us about six weeks. It didn’t feel like the necessary, or prudent, thing to do. But as Cassidy sauntered near us in a long, strapless summer dress—where we hid in the shade of a maple tree on a ninety degree day, sweating and feeling totally gross—I saw Heidi grope awkwardly at a jean skirt and blouse, which she was clearly sweating through. I saw all shreds of self-confidence dissolve.
“Who’s that?” Heidi asked later, after the phony smiles and “So nice to meet yous” were through, after Cassidy had walked away in search of another happy marriage she could muddle. “Your secretary?”
I never knew what Heidi meant by that, if it would have been better or worse if Cassidy Knudsen was my secretary.
Later, at home, I caught Heidi pulling negligible gray hairs from her head with a pair of tweezers. Soon after, beauty products besieged our vanity, those laden with antiwrinkle agents and age defying vows.
This is what I’m remembering as I thrust Henry’s cell phone back at him, making sure to say, “Here you go, Henry,” in a powerful tone so that Heidi, back home in Chicago, knows Cassidy and I are not alone, and flee into the hallway with my own phone. Heidi is a beautiful woman, don’t get me wrong. Gorgeous. A person would never guess an entire decade sat between Cassidy and my wife.
And yet, Heidi knew.